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I’m new to Airtable, and trying to understand the big picture of what it can and cannot do when it comes to app building.


We have a need to build an app that displays customer & internally submitted ideas, with a navigation (tree?) of Products & their categories to help filter results. I see we can allow non-paid users to submit ideas via a Form, see results as read only, and possibly interact with some additional Form / automation work arounds for things like voting and comments on other people’s ideas (hopefully without making it cumbersome to the user).


I’ve experimented with Interfaces a bit to review what kinds of elements are available, and am exploring templates.


Questions I still have:



  1. It is possible to have just an expandable tree of Products and their Categories in one element, that when selected filters a second list element? We would be starting with 30,000 records, and would need to filter down the view. The Record Picker element would be a good fallback, but I believe we would need to have a secondary picker that is dependent on the first, before finally displaying records.

  2. Can we restrict who fills out the Form, if we already have them logged in to a parent app which can authenticate via SSO to the airtable app, embedded or in iFrame?

  3. If we want unpaid users to be able to vote on an issue, any ideas on setting that up? My first thought is some kind of link to a form that is auto-filled, auto-submitted, and triggers automation, but it’s the limiting to one vote (and removing the vote) that I’m not sure about, unless we can record who is submitting the form.


Thanks,

Erin

Can we restrict who fills out the Form, if we already have them logged in to a parent app which can authenticate via SSO to the airtable app, embedded or in iFrame?


To answer your question about restricting a form via SSO, you can definitely restrict Airtable forms to only logged-in users who have logged into your Airtable base or interface, and if you’re on the Enterprise plan, you can have users login via SSO.

However, if you’re not on the Enterprise plan, or if you want non-Airtable users to log into your forms securely via SSO, then you would need to use Fillout’s Airtable forms for that.

With Fillout, you can create a login page for your form, which will give you these options:

  1. You can restrict the logins by SSO.
  2. You can restrict the logins by email domain.
  3. You can restrict the logins by password.
  4. You can restrict logins based on a pre-approved list of email addresses that you have stored in your Airtable base.
  5. You can verify & confirm that the user is typing in a valid email address.
  6. You can limit form entries to one entry per person.

After the user logs in using your login page, that will let Fillout know who the user is and what the user’s email address is.

You can use this information to automatically prefill other fields on your form based on who logged into your form, and you can even use this information to do other advanced tricks with Fillout.

For example, you could use Fillout’s advanced filtering features to filter your linked record fields to only show the user the linked records that they are allowed to see.

And Fillout offers lots of other advanced features for Airtable as well, such as the ability to:

  • Update existing Airtable records using a form
  • Display Airtable lookup fields & Airtable attachment fields on forms
  • Create new linked records on a form
  • Create PDF documents from form submissions, and then attach those PDF files to the Airtable record

I show how to use a few of the advanced features of Fillout on these 2 Airtable podcast episodes:

Hope this helps!

If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

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